Elfriede Jelinek

Jelinek was drilled from early childhood in organ, piano, and recorder toward the prodigy's career her mother had planned, studying at the Vienna Conservatory while acute anxiety made the concert stage impossible. The Piano Teacher (1983) hands that biography to Erika Kohut (approaching forty, sharing her mother's bed, policing her students) and follows it into the dark.

From the start she was a language-first writer: montage, puns, and advertising cadences turned against themselves in novels like Lust and The Children of the Dead, and in a torrent of plays flaying Austria's buried Nazism, Alpine kitsch, and sexual violence.

The 2004 Nobel honored her 'musical flow of voices and counter-voices'; citing social phobia, she accepted by video from Vienna, and one Academy member resigned in protest, a scandal she observed with characteristic lack of surprise.